In the age of Google and Wikileaks, it seems fitting that Youngblood Theatre should revisit the story of Dr. John Faustus, Christopher Marlowe’s version of the Faust tale. Marlowe’s 16th-century play shows what a century of printing presses hath wrought – a world hungry for knowledge but uncertain of what to do with it.
Dr. Faustus, in the old story, is certainly one helluva smarty pants – a sort of flesh & blood IBM Watson who is hungry to reach beyond the limits of his already formidable knowledge. He agrees to give his soul to the devil in exchange for 24 years of life with Mephistopheles as his servant, assuming that arrangement will yield new insights and knowledge-power.
As the title suggests (An Apology For The Course And Outcome Of Certain Events Delivered By Doctor John Faustus On This His Final Evening), Mickle Maher’s play introduces us to Dr. John as he faces the last hour of his life. He delivers his apology to the assembled audience, while the devil himself (Rich Gillard) looks on with a spooky and steely impassivity. It seems the preceding two-dozen years haven’t exactly been a walk in the research park for the good doctor. His new servant has been more annoyance than sage, constantly getting his breakfast eggshells into the Faustus’ bedclothes, and snooping around in his diary.
And as to his search for knowledge and meaning, well that hasn’t worked out too well, either. To avoid revealing anything to the devil, Faustus has filled his diary only with pages and pages of hash marks. His trips back and forward in time have yielded strikingly poetic images, but little insight or certainty. In fact, he hilariously assumes the part of a 21st-century slacker, hanging out in a 7-Eleven parking lot with a couple of sixers of Bud and a bag of potato chips.
Yet, Maher’s language and Michael Cotey’s charming performance as Faustus makes all these stale, flat and unprofitable encounters intoxicating. Maher’s imagistic language is poised somewhere between Milton and William Burroughs, a kind of surreal metaphysics. Even as we hear Faustus’ further encounters with worldly emptiness, his visions are rendered with the exhilarating fullness of Maher’s words.
Director Edward Morgan creates just the right atmosphere and tone for the piece, which is performed in an ominously beautiful warehouse space, complete with a freight elevator that takes Faustus on his final journey. An Apology…. is unlike anything you’ve seen in a conventional theater, and it’s one more reason to keep an eye on Youngblood.
